Bjarne Däcker joined Ericsson in 1966 as programmer and systems analyst. In 1984 he set up the Computer Science Lab together with Mike Williams to explore, develop and introduce new software technology in Ericsson often in collaboration with university research. The CSLab pioneered things like Unix, A.I., Lisp, Prolog and workstations in Ericsson. Erlang was created at the CSLab by an initial team of Joe Armstrong, Mike Williams and
Robert Virding. Bjarne organised the first Erlang User Conference in
1994. He has had various external committments such as chairman
of the steering committee of the Swedish national research programme in
Computer Science 1987-1992 and member of the Evaluation Committee of European
Union's ICT-Prize. The CSLab was closed in 2002 in the IT crash. Bjarne holds a Technology Licentiate degree
of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and was promoted to an Honorary
Doctorate of Technology at Linköping University in 1993. He is also a member
of the Royal Swedish Academy of the Engineering Sciences.

Bjarne Däcker is Giving the Following Talks

A discussion of basic vs. applied research in the software domain and the creation of Erlang

This talk will present some of the thinking behind the creation of the Computer Science Laboratory (CS Lab) at Ericsson - one of the technology oriented labs within Ericsson Research. It is at the CS Lab where a group effort in software research resulted in Erlang's birth. The talk will describe some of the projects which lead to Erlang, and when it finally became mainstream within Ericsson, the OTP Erlang middleware project. It will conclude by describing how the technology transfer to the newly created Erlang/OTP unit happened.